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At our last meeting during the DITA Adoption Committee listening session, Puppet representatives shared some early details from their ongoing DITA migration project. During our meeting on the 28th of June, they’ll be presenting on “What We’re Learning: Midway Through Puppet’s DITA Migration.”

From Michelle Fredette, Puppet’s documentation manager:

Puppet writers talk about their migration from markdown files stored in GitHub and published to a static site, to DITA files managed in easyDITA and published to the company’s Drupal site. We’ll talk about the long slow march and decisions we’ve made to convert hundreds of files, design our architecture, train the team, and create a new publishing pipeline.

Food and chatter start at 5:45 at Puppet’s offices (308 SW 2nd Ave, Portland), with the presentation starting at 6:00. This will also be our quarterly meeting.

On March 8, Amber Swope and Nancy Harrison of the DITA Adoption Technical Committee met with local DITA practitioners to listen to stories, suggestions, and complaints in reference to their individual journeys of DITA adoption. In attendance were representatives from FiServ, NetApp, Daimler, Viewpoint, and other local companies, and also Keith Schengili-Roberts, Scott Hudson, and Stan Doherty of the DATC.

The Technical Committee was particularly interested in gaps in the DITA specification that could be filled in for the next release. However, the discussion was wide-ranging, including the challenges of SME authoring in DITA, the need to constrain elements for new DITA writers to ease the learning curve, and the restructuring of existing content required before migration. We learned that the Lightweight DITA Committee is making progress on Markdown-to-DITA authoring; most attendees registered their recommendation for the Git flavor of Markdown as the most useful one.

If you missed this session and want to share your opinions, listening sessions will be ongoing, including one that will take place at the DITA North America conference in San Diego on April 25th. You can learn about more upcoming sessions as they’re scheduled at https://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita-adoption/listeningsessions.

Last night the PDX DITA faithful met to discuss recent noise about where DITA fits into a world where new developer-friendly tools are proliferating and gaining more functionality, and where some CMS vendors have been suggesting that CMS functionality makes DITA unnecessary and perhaps obsolete. To be fair, everyone at the table is working in DITA so we’re not free of bias, but it was interesting to talk about which use cases work for DITA and which don’t, and some of the reasons why other people don’t find DITA compelling.

A few themes emerged from the discussion:

–DITA has a lot of complexity and a big learning curve, but most of us have experienced the same problem with any tools as soon as the complexity and scale of projects increases. For a small project without a lot of content reuse, or multiple editions and versions in flight at once, or just a few writers, most tools do pretty well; when you start scaling up, you get into challenges and the workflows get less simple.

–It’s hard for people who don’t maintain information at scale and over time to understand how maintaining it can be as challenging and complex as maintaining code. Because most writing is ad hoc, created by non-specialists, and serves only one audience at a time, people who aren’t content or tech docs professionals are attracted to tools that present writing as text without apparatus. (A number of attendees had experience with showing someone in another job function the Oxygen XML editing interface and watching them recoil.)

–But those of us who are responsible for maintaining thousands of topics with overlapping content and producing and maintaining output for multiple audiences are kind of cynical about the value of hiding the complexity; it’s lurking underneath the covers anyway, since authors inevitably become responsible for the implicit context and future of what they write. (This is why I, personally, roll my eyes a little about the idea that DITA “frees writers up to just write”: as soon as you write something you’re making some tradeoffs about, for example, how audience-friendly versus future-proof and reusable it is. That means you probably have to know something about what’s going to happen to your text after you write it, whether you are yourself tagging any topic references or running filters against it, or not.)

—Tom Johnson alleged that developers don’t like XML and this led to a long digression about what developers will and won’t do when providing content, and whether this is any kind of blocker to developers’ creating documentation. There was some consensus that large repositories of developer-created content probably won’t end up being created in DITA (unless there is some kind of form-based interface intervening) but some attendees had had good experiences working with developers who wanted to single-source UI text and documentation text and saw XML as a logical choice for UIs to consume.

–Attendees had some useful responses to the allegations that a CCMS can replace DITA itself: when you do that, you’re back in the world of help authoring tools because insofar as the logic of the CCMS overrides the logic of DITA, you’re going to end up with functionality that is not portable once you take your content out of that CMS. For example, if you rely on the conditional processing of your CMS for filtered output, you will have to recreate that tagging in your DITA source if you start over in a different CMS. This creates the kinds of uncomfortable relationships with tool vendors that we have talked about before, where there is a cost to moving away from a tool, or you’re waiting on bug fixes to the tool to solve your problems. (I think I have that right. We use SVN and have never used a CMS.)

–There were many tacos. So many tacos.

As usual, it was a great and collegial discussion. Thanks to everyone who participated!

Our next DITA meeting will be Wednesday, March 16th from 6:30-8:00. As usual we’ll provide some beer and dinner (please try and RSVP if you’re coming).

Instead of a presentation, our March DITA meetup will feature a discussion on the subject of “Defending DITA”. DITA gets a lot of shade from various quarters: some writers think it’s too techy. Developers think it’s too complicated when there are tools like Markdown. And at last year’s Tekom conference, some German CCMS vendors claimed it was entirely unnecessary if you already have a CCMS.

Here are a few articles I’ve been reading to get you started, but if you’d rather, bring your own examples of how you’ve heard DITA attacked and how you responded. Are some of these critiques legitimate? What isn’t DITA good for, and how will you answer if you’re asked to explain why it is right for your use cases (IF it is)?

Two articles blogger Tom Johnson wrote comparing DITA to Jekyll and other developer tools:

On October 28th from 6:30-8:00, please join us and members of the Fiserv technical communications team for dinner, conversation, and an overview of how Fiserv is using DITA metadata to build a site with faceted information search. We’ve struggled with search in our own Help implementations, so this one should be really interesting.

Here is their description:

Join the Fiserv Technical Communications team as they explain how they use metadata embedded in DITA topics for the faceted search features of their online documentation system. They will also present the supporting technology and the process they went through to plan and develop the features.

Got a great idea for a short DITA presentation (20-30 minutes)? Send it along by Friday, May 29th and you could be the star of our next meeting on June 10th. Topics can address any aspect of DITA at any level (no vendor demos, please).

The highlight of last night’s meeting of the PDX DITA User’s Group was Keith Schengili-Roberts’ presentation on The State of DITA 2015. Using the crude metric of “more people to feed at our meetings” over the last few years, we had observed that interest in DITA is growing, but Keith provided a more expansive view of the subject based on his research from the last decade. Here is a sampling of data-based observations drawn from his analysis of job postings, case studies, presentations, LinkedIn references and individual reports:

Many hundreds of companies worldwide use DITA, with a concentration in the United States and specifically in California.

Computer software might still be the largest individual industry using DITA, but a large array of industries outside software make up the lion’s share of users.

The Q&A covered DITA and aerospace standards, demand in the DITA-based CMS market, how review processes work in a DITA-based documentation organization, and how to get better PDFs out of DITA. And Mark Giffin, who called in from California (he is on the OASIS Lightweight DITA committee), alerted us to the existence of an open-source Markdown-to-DITA plugin. This should be of interest to DITA users who work with programmers who see DITA as an obstacle to collaboration.

Thanks to Keith for providing such a great and engaging talk! You can read more about Keith’s work at his blog, Ditawriter.com. Keith’s presentation was sponsored by Ixiasoft who happen to be his employer as well as a maker of DITA component content management systems. (Thanks to Leah d’Emilio for setting up the tech side and making sure everything went smoothly.)

We were especially pleased to see a handful of new DITA users turning up to explore and network: if you’ve been dithering about coming to a meetup because you’re not yet using DITA, please consider this an invitation to show up and find out more. Also, we discovered proudly that one of our regular attendees found a new job by networking at one of our meetings! We like to be socially useful as well as charming so this was very gratifying news. Maybe you will be next.

We’re very excited to be able to feature a remote presentation on “The State of DITA 2015” at our March meeting (see the sidebar on our main page for time, date, and location details). In-person attendees will gather for dinner as usual at 6:30, with the presentation starting at 6:45. If you want to attend remotely, please drop a line to pdxdita@gmail.com.

Keith Schengili-Roberts, DITA Information Architect for IXIASOFT and the writer behind the popular “DITAWriter.com” blog, has been doing extensive research on who is using DITA, where they are using it, what tools they are using and why. He has surveyed the technical writing marketplace in the United States and the role that DITA skills and experience have come to play in it. If you want to get a better sense as to who is using DITA, what software tools are popular and the many ways in which DITA is being used worldwide, come to this presentation!

We’re accepting submissions for a short presentation at our March 18th meeting, so if you’ve had the stirrings of a DITA topic in your back pocket, please pull it out, brush off the lint, and turn it into a 20-minute talk. We would love to hear from you on any topic related to DITA XML.

To accept the mantle of grandiloquence, just drop a line to docs@jivesoftware.com before March 1st.

A quick and enthusiastic report on last night’s PDX DITA holiday potluck with special guests from the WritetheDocs PDX Meetup Group. But first, a picture of happy documentarians.

We packed 30 people into our largest conference room for a delicious potluck (thanks Puppet team for the buffalo wings!) and a short presentation introducing DITA to prospective users. Leona Campbell and Melanie Jennings enthusiastically described the benefits and challenges of DITA as well as sharing experiences about what it’s like to get up and running with DITA when you’ve previously worked with different toolsets. Because we had a range of experiences at the table, from DITA consultants to working DITA writers to total newbies, there was a great ensuing discussion about why you’d want to use DITA rather than another tool. We also covered the need for different kinds of tooling depending on scale, the challenges of converting existing content versus writing topic-based content in DITA from scratch, and the always popular question of just how challenging it is to teach yourself DITA.

Another great outcome was the robust audience recommendations of resources, both print and online. We’ll be adding to the Resources section of this site soon, so stay tuned.

A big thank you to Mike Jang of WritetheDocs Meetup PDX for the opportunity to join forces, and to Melanie and Leona for a wonderful presentation. We’re looking forward to hearing more from our attendees, especially those who are starting up their DITA pilots soon.